Thursday, October 05, 2006 Ng: The IPod craze and the arrival of Zune By Wilson Ng Wired Desktop
GADGETS. During the Cebu information and communication technology (ICT) mission trip in North America, we also visited several companies, as well as various computer stores. In most of the stores, even department stores, one of the products that is almost dominant in displays—you even see people using them in trains, cars, planes—is the Apple Ipod.
Apple’s media players are so good that they have inspired a massive gadget ecosystem, and spawned thousands of imitators, as well as third party providers.
Even luxury cars now are offering to have Ipod players instead of compact disc players. When you are broadcasting audio from your website, you are now said to be podcasting, in obvious reference to the IPod.
This Christmas, one of the most watched introductions will be Microsoft’s Zune.
It will be a hard battle for Microsoft since the IPod’s success is said to be based on beauty, simplicity and ‘extreme coolness,’ which Microsoft is not noted for.
However, based on reviews, there are some ‘cool’ features of the incoming Zune, which could make it worth the try.
According to Mike Elgan of Computerworld, Microsoft’s Zune player will be made in China by Toshiba.
It will have a 30-gigabyte hard drive and a three-inch screen for video. Unlike that Apple Ipod, it will have a Wifi peer-to-peer connectivity and an FM tuner.
The nice thing is that it will allow people to share songs, play lists and jpg photos with four other simultaneous Zune users using Wifi. So if I download a song, I pay for it and I own it. However, I can also share the song, and when I do share it, the person getting it can play it three times for up to three days for free.
The thing that people will find cool about the Zune is that it is viral.
Teens and the twenty-something like to share videos and songs, making websites like MySpace.com and Youtube.com the top websites now.
With the Zune, students will be free to share music, videos and photos in class or anywhere else. They’ll be able to pass notes to one another.
Who will win? We don’t know yet, but it will benefit consumers.
NETWORKING. On another front, social networking seems to be the “in” thing now. If we go back to the leading websites nowadays, whether friendster, myspace, or youtube or the phenomena of blogging, you will note that people like to go to websites where they not only read information, but also get to socially interact and share their own thoughts and experiences with others. Some people have dubbed it Web 2.0.
It is one of the things we got from the recent ICT mission. There is now some good demand for the nature of websites to be changed—from something static and updated by the webmaster, to something which anybody in the company can update and which allows readers and other people to interact with or comment on.
In short, websites nowadays are expected to allow two-way conversations instead of just allowing one-way traffic.
Even news sites now not only dish out news, but solicit comments and allow users to interact with their writers and editors.
In this day when websites are dramatically changing, what do you think will be the comment of people visiting a website that has not been updated for six months?
